


And I'd have told you I was lonely too

by fortunehasgivenup



Category: Good Girls (TV), Graceland (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fatherhood, Murder, Rio is Johnny, Unhealthy Relationships, mention of miscarriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:27:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24753946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fortunehasgivenup/pseuds/fortunehasgivenup
Summary: When Graceland goes to shit, Johnny goes north.Bit by bit, he makes himself anew, until there's only Rio.
Relationships: Beth Boland/Rio, Paige Arkin/Johnny Tuturro, Rhea/Rio (Good Girls)
Comments: 39
Kudos: 230





	And I'd have told you I was lonely too

**Author's Note:**

> This will make the most sense if you've seen Graceland.

When Graceland goes to shit, Johnny goes north.

He’s on “stress leave”, which at that point means that the Bureau doesn’t know what to do with him. Doesn’t know if it can trust him. And you know what? Johnny’s tired of being the one holding everything together, so he doesn’t try to convince his bosses otherwise. He just takes it and goes.

At first, he thinks maybe he’ll go for the complete opposite of LA, but that leads him to either Alaska or Utah and he’s not going either of those fucking places.

Instead, he settles for a different border.

Detroit is weird at first.

Cold, for one. He moves in September and there are people still wearing t-shirts outside. He’s not entirely sure that he’s going to be able to survive winter.

People are nice enough, but it’s in a different kind of way from California. It suits him, to his surprise.

Johnny doesn’t intend to get involved in anyone’s life. He’s been doing that as long as he’s been alive and all it’s gotten him is hurt and overlooked and taken for granted. He talks his way into a bartending gig easily enough and gets himself an apartment in a shitty neighbourhood that feels like home.

Sometimes, he misses the luxuries of Graceland. The huge kitchen. The giant walk in shower that never seemed to run out of hot water. Surfing. Apparently here, you only surf in the winter. Johnny’s not insane.

Other times, he finds himself picking up more orange juice than he needs because Mike always fucking forgot to buy his own and he would sometimes sneak it from Charlie or Jakes. Charlie was fine with it. Jakes? It was easier to just buy Mike his own orange juice.

Then he’ll be emptying his grocery bags and putting everything in the fridge and realize what he’s done. The fridge in his apartment doesn’t even have space for two orange juice cartons.

He goes out, uses his natural charm to meet women. Fucks a lot of them in bathrooms and cars, not wanting to take them back to his place and them not trusting him enough to take him back to theirs.

He kisses a few guys too, wondering if the flutter in his gut those few times with Carlito had been anything more than adrenaline and sheer fucking nerves, underpinned by fear. Ultimately, he decides that he’s not into it, but he learns other things too.

Like the type of women that he’s actually interested in spending time with - not the type that he deals with through cases. He likes them smart, capable of cutting through him with just a few words, and unwilling to compromise who they are.

He likes going out on dates, talking to them, taking them to bed and showing them how good he can make them feel. None of them last more than a month or so, though. Then the conversations turn more personal. Where is he from? What does he do? They start to tell him about their lives and their problems and Johnny knows that if he doesn’t cut ties and run, he’ll be right back where he started, caught up in everyone else’s strings.

If Johnny wants to steer clear of getting involved with people, he certainly doesn’t want to get involved with crime on either side of the equation. That is, up until the night he gets pulled into it.

There’s arguing, out in the hall, that wakes him up sometime around 1 am in March. Groaning, he pulls on a pair of sweats and listens at the door for a minute.

“Hey man,” he says when he opens his door, “leave her the fuck alone. She doesn’t know where her son is.”

He makes eye contact with Louise, his neighbour. She has a piece of shit son, Ty, he knows that much. He’s gotten the impression that Ty runs with a bad crowd. Even though he’s still technically a minor, he doesn’t come around much and when he does, there’s a whole lot of shouting.

The man at Louise’s door turns to look at Johnny. “This isn’t your fucking business,” he snaps.

“It is when it’s disturbing my sleep,” Johnny replies, leaning against the doorframe.

The guy is muscle, obviously, but he’s not smart muscle or even good muscle. He’s just big. Never had to learn how to actually fight. Johnny’s not worried about being able to deal with him.

“Go back into your apartment,” the guy says, rounding on Johnny, “and shut the fuck up.”

Johnny doesn’t even need to think, just disarms the guy as he starts to lift his gun. Breaks his nose for good measure, then takes all the bullets out and gives the guy back the gun in pieces.

“Get the fuck out of my hallway,” Johnny says.

Louise’s door is shut as the guy rushes past it, hand to his nose, but the next day, she leaves him a pineapple upside-down cake.

Johnny doesn’t know what the guy told his boss about his broken nose, but later he hears that Ty got his arm broken for it.

“He was a good kid,” Louise tells him when he returns her plate minus the cake. “His brother was the troublesome one.”

He can’t help himself. “What happened?”

“Cyrus enlisted,” Louise says, lifting a photo down from a shelf and passing it to Johnny. “He died, about two years after.”

Johnny looks down at the photo of the young man, grave in his uniform. He looks like the photos of Ty that are still up.

“Tyler stopped going to school, started hanging out with some of the older guys.” Louise just sounds tired as she tells him the story. She’s resigned, he realizes, to losing both sons. Doesn’t matter which side of the ocean they were on, she couldn’t protect them.

He tracks down Ty.

“Leave me the fuck alone, man,” Ty snaps. Johnny thinks if he didn’t have his arm in a sling, he’d try to shove him.

“No,” Johnny says. “You may not give a shit about your life, but your mother does.”

“So you’re gonna scare me straight?” Ty says with a laugh.

“No,” Johnny replies calmly, “I’m going to watch your back.”

Ty doesn’t know what to make of that. Seems confused. But he doesn’t try to chase Johnny away when he goes with him to pick up a shipment.

Everything about it is wrong. Every single person there is sloppy. Half of them are on their phones. Johnny half expects the cops or someone else to just walk in and arrest them.

“You don’t do business like that anymore,” Johnny tells Ty.

“What?”

Johnny nods over his shoulder towards the warehouse that they just left. “Didn’t anyone teach you shit? You don’t have the money and the product in the same place. Keep electronics to a minimum. Fuck, it’s like you’re all asking to get caught.”

Ty laughs. “Sounds like you’ve got some lessons to impart on me, old man.”

Johnny scowls. He’s not old. He’s not even 30 yet.

“C’mon,” Ty says, “my boss wants to meet you. He knows you’re the one who knocked the shit out of Toller, wants to meet you.”

Ty’s boss, Blue, is nothing but a low level dealer. He thinks because he has a couple of guys who have won bar brawls and a bunch of kids running goods for him that he’s hot shit.

Fuck Johnny, he thinks to himself as he slams his foot into Blue’s chest, thought you were staying out of people’s lives.

But Blue had pulled the trigger on a seventeen year old, who Johnny can still hear hollering in pain somewhere behind him. Toller and another guy are being held at bay by the gun that he’s holding on Blue.

“You feel particularly close to this piece of shit?” Johnny asks.

Both of the guys shake their heads.

“Then I suggest you get the fuck out and you forget ever being here tonight.”

They leave, taking Ty with them after Johnny gives them instructions to drop him off at the emergency room. He'd survive the bullet that Blue had put in his shoulder.

Blue’s coughing up blood - Johnny hit him hard - as he laughs up at Johnny. “Think you’re a tough guy, huh?”

Johnny sighs. “No,” he replies, then pulls the trigger.

He’s cleaned up enough crime scenes at this point, fabricated some of them even, that it’s easy as 1-2-3. The police won’t look too hard. They aren’t interested in who killed Blue. But Blue’s boss will be, so Johnny tracks him down. He leaves the man’s bar with a new job and a kilo of mediocre heroin to move.

Ty starts going back to school once he’s out of the hospital, but Louise looks at Johnny like she’s not sure if she should be scared of him or grateful.

From there, it’s easy. Johnny’s always been able to sell shit. He was good at it before Graceland, during, still is. If anything, the Bureau made him better. How to sell something to your superiors, your fellow agents, how to lie through your teeth and hope like fuck that it works out so by the time that they figure out you lied, you’ve got a victory to hand ‘em.

Now, his boss is a guy named Tijuana Dave. Dave’s not from Tijuana and Johnny doubts he’s even been there, but it’s what everyone calls him, so he doesn’t question it. There’s probably a story from back when he was coming up, just like Johnny. Levi. Bates. Who uses their real name when they’re going against shit that they used to believe in.

“What’s your name?” Tijuana Dave asks the first time that Johnny actually meets him. He’s apparently forgotten whatever Blue’s boss, Jennings, told him.

“Rio,” Johnny says. “Name’s Rio.”

He doesn’t know why he picks it. 

So he stops being Johnny like he stopped being Joseph like he stopped being José. It’s easy after a while, dropping one name in favour of another.

He hears someone say Rio and he knows it’s him.

Ink covers up a lot of secrets, he thinks as he lies in a tattoo parlour getting a bird that covers his neck. Makes people look at you, makes them look away. It’s the only thing they notice about you sometimes. He blanks his mind as the artist works, glad that she’s blonde and curvy in a way that Charlie never was.

Mick, who's a bit of an enforcer in the crew despite being too smart for it, comes with him and then drags him out to his mom’s house for some of the best fucking food he’s had since he left LA.

He groans when he bites in and Mick’s mom laughs, patting his shoulder.

“You’re too skinny,” she scolds him even though he’s only known her half an hour. Rio grins as he digs into a second helping and promises to come back next week.

Tijuana Dave is a dumbass, who’s barely turning a profit because he’s not bringing in enough product to meet demand. It makes Rio twitch, wanting to fix things, make things work like they should.

So one night, he does. Someone gives him a name of a supplier looking to expand into the area and he laughs and laughs in his shitty apartment for hours.

Next day, he sends up a flag for Briggs.

Briggs is a lot of things, but he’s not dumb. He comes to see Rio at a coffee shop near his place where he’s been going to flirt with the cute barista. Her name is Rhea and she’s in school to become a dental hygienist. She’s pretty and no one in her family runs a cartel.

“John boy,” Briggs says when he takes a seat.

“Rio,” Rio says. “Didn’t think you’d use Odin Rossi again.”

Briggs shrugs. “Name brand recognition.”

Rio snorts.

“Was wondering where you ended up. No one’d heard from you,” Briggs comments, drinking green tea like they ran into each other innocently. Just two old friends, catching up.

“Yeah, I don’t particularly give a shit,” Rio tells him.

Briggs nods, sage as ever. “Why’d you wanna meet then?”

Rio leans back in his chair. “You’re in Chicago, I assume.”

“Yeah.”

“Looking for distribution out here,” Rio goes on. “Going forward, that’s gonna be me.”

“Yeah. Why would I do that?”

“Because,” Rio scoffs, “you know I won’t sell you out. Not without setting my own house on fire.”

They make a deal and that night, Rio goes to Tijuana Dave’s house to drop off his cut of the latest batch.

“You know,” he says to Dave, “you could be making way more than this if you were smart about it.”

Dave sneers. “You saying I’m not smart, Rio?”

“I know you’re not,” Rio tells him calmly, pulling the trigger even before Dave notices that he’s got a gun. After he cleans up, he sends it around that anyone working for Dave is welcome to work for him if they want. There’s a few guys, like Mick, that he genuinely likes, thinks he’ll work well with.

But it’s only been a few days since shooting a man in cold blood before he starts getting jittery.

And who’s he gonna go talk to? There’s no Charlie, no Paige, no Jakes. Fuck, he’d even take Mike at this point.

But there is Rhea.

He asks her out, she smiles and laughs, tells him she never thought he’d ask.

After they go out to dinner, Rio takes her back to her apartment. She kisses him goodnight and tells him she doesn’t fuck on a first date.

She does on the second though and he actually fucks her hoarse. She just makes pitiful little moans after he pulls out, finally exhausted.

“It’s been a while,” he tells her.

Rhea throws her arm out and nudges him away. “You’re like the Energizer bunny. Anyone ever tell you that?”

He laughs, then decides that he’s gotta pay her back for that, so he puts his head back between her legs until she cries.

From there, it turns into a familiar balancing game. Rio the criminal. Rio the boyfriend.

He pivots away from drugs as soon as he’s got enough clout to stand on his own.

“Good timing,” Briggs admits when he and Rio meet in Chicago. “I’ve been talking to Chuck and -“

“I don’t give a fuck,” Rio cuts him off.

Briggs nods, but he looks almost sad for a moment. “I wish I hadn’t fucked it all up for you,” he says.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe if you’d had someone else to look up to,” Briggs tells him, “you wouldn’t have tried to be like me. You never would have gone under with the Solanos and -“

Rio walks away, ignoring the pang that he feels when Briggs calls after him, “Take care of yourself!”

He and Rhea move in together, this apartment significantly nicer than the last one either of them were in.

All the while, he makes moves. They’ve barely been living together for a month before Rhea starts puking in the morning and Rio knows what that means. He goes out and comes back with a pregnancy test and some prenatal vitamins for her.

“I want to keep it,” she says firmly.

Rio nods. “I do too.”

There’d been a while, way back when he’d been Johnny, when he’d thought about having a kid with Lucia. Part of him had wanted it, but most of him was scared of what it would mean. Even with his last name, their kid would have been a Solano.

Now he’s the dangerous one and he wonders if Rhea thinks about that, worries about what he might bring into the life of their child.

He wonders if he should call his mom, let her know about her grandkid. When he mentions the baby to Mick’s mom, she’s overjoyed, but she asks him a few days later, “Are there other people that you want to share this with?” and Rio shakes his head.

They don’t last long after Marcus is born, but Rio wants what’s best for Rhea and Marcus, even if he and Rhea aren’t together. So he moves her into a suburban area. She purses her lips when he says he bought the house and that he’ll be handling mortgage payments.

“The rest is yours though,” he says. “And the house is in both our names for now. You want it just in yours, we’ll talk.”

Rhea is exceptionally good at conveying disappointment with just a look, even while bouncing a one-year-old her hip. “It worth it?” she asks. It’s probably the closest she’s come since the day she found him scrubbing blood off his hands to actually asking him about what he does.

The details of it are irrelevant to Rhea. It’s violent. It’s criminal. She doesn’t want it around her, their baby.

Rio doesn’t have an answer for that, so instead, he smiles at Marcus and says, “He is.”

———————————

Rio has remnants of his old life around. Not many, of course. Nothing that ties him too identifiably to his old self. Fuck, he’d almost teared up getting rid of everything that said Long Beach on it. If people ask, he tells them he’s from California, but never anything more than that. His past isn’t his past anymore.

Johnny was sentimental, kept connections alive, loved people easily. Rio does not have that luxury and what’s more, doesn’t fucking want it.

He’s taken to carrying one such remnant with him when he goes to work - pulls it out and holds it in his hands when he wants to remind the people that he works with that he’s not to be toyed with and when he needs to remind himself of how to harden himself to the world.

The gold gun becomes something of a talisman for him.

He doesn’t _use_ Carlito’s gun. He’d have to be real stupid to think that was even remotely a good idea.

But he keeps it and he’s not sure what that says about his overall state of mind.

Be a good boy, Johnny, he thinks as he cleans it.

Briggs, Warren, Jakes - they might not have said it in those words, but they’d expected it of him.

Johnny will let me walk away with over nine million dollars in stolen money. Johnny won’t ask questions if I ask him to do this for me. Johnny will believe me if I tell him that he doesn’t need to detain me.

You get tired of being the glue after a while.

———————————————

Marcus is going into kindergarten when Rio gets in touch with Jakes.

“Gallo,” the other man says when they sit down to breakfast at a diner in Canada.

The name rings a bell. “You and Courtney still together?” Rio asks.

Jakes - no, Gallo- nods, then smiles.

Rio doesn’t even remember the last time he saw a smile on this particular face. It certainly hadn’t looked like this. He waits to be let in on the joke.

“We got a three year old. Malcolm.”

Rio nods. “Good for you.”

“Listen, Johnny -“ Jakes stops himself, “Rio, I did some shit that I regret.”

He leans back in the booth and starts to laugh. “I don’t particularly give a fuck,” Rio tells him honestly. “You and me, man? We don’t know each other. We do business together. You deal with my money.”

Jakes sets his jaw. “What happened to you?”

There’s a flicker of rage in his belly at that. “Go take a look in a mirror and maybe you’ll figure it out,” he tells him. “We done with the catch-up now? We have details to iron out.”

After that, they part ways. Jakes jetting off to whatever tax haven, no extradition country he lives in with his wife and his son. Rio doesn’t even remember what the other one had been called. 

Because Jakes had had a different son. They’d had different lives once, both of them. All of them had, but Graceland had made monsters of each one of them in their own way.

—————————————

He’s not expecting Paige to slide into the seat across from him one night at the bar and say, “Hi.”

“Yeah?” he says, looking across the bar table at her. She’s got a bruise on her jaw and an impressive scar on her arm.

“That’s it?” Paige asks. “All you’re gonna say to me?”

Rio shrugs. “What else you wanna hear?”

“I’m in town for a couple days for a conference,” she says, “and I’m walking through the local field office when I see your picture on a wall.”

“Should you be telling me that, Agent Arkin?” Rio asks, downing a shot.

Paige does the same. “What happened to us?”

He prefers this one to the one that Jakes posed to him.

“What’s that quote,” he says, “stare into the abyss long enough and the abyss stares back at you?”

It makes her laugh, then harden. “You deal in girls?”

“No.” He has lines he won’t cross. That’s one of them.

Paige nods. “They don’t even know who you are,” she admits. “Don’t know that you used to be Joseph “Johnny” Tuturro. Né José, of course. Former federal agent.”

“You’re forgetting my time in the navy,” he reminds her.

“Right,” she nods, “you did that too.”

He and Paige had never fucked back in the house. It had seemed too weird, too dangerous. If it had blown up, it would have taken the house down, just like Charlie and Briggs did eventually. But he’s seen her naked plenty of times, even kissed her on a few occasions.

They’re rough with each other as they fuck on the bed in Paige’s hotel room. They know that the other can take it. If she’s intrigued by all of his new marks - the scars, the tattoos - she doesn’t say anything.

After they’re both done and he’s pulling his shoes back on, she laughs. He looks over his shoulder at her, lying on her back in the bed, grin on her face.

“What?” he can’t help but ask.

She looks at him. “Honestly? Kicking myself in the ass for not doing that sooner.”

He feels like Johnny for a brief moment as he grins at Paige, but only for a moment. He shutters off that part of him and finishes getting dressed.

“Stay out of my way, Arkin,” he tells her. “You never had trouble with that before.”

A few months later, he sends her a name without comment. Within weeks, the guy’s arrested on trafficking charges. He tells himself that he does it because it opens up some business for his own ventures. Paige doesn’t reply, but he sees her on the news.

He takes Marcus to the park that weekend. Sometimes, it feels like he’s looking into a magic mirror at his past self. He just wants his son to have a peaceful life, uncomplicated by allegiances and alphabet agencies. Doesn’t want him to know the best ways to cut heroin or dispose of a body. He wants Marcus to be happy, like Johnny once was, but he wants him to be stronger too.

“Higher!” Marcus demands as he pushes him on the swings, pumping his little legs in a mostly chaotic fashion that’s not gonna help him get higher.

“Yeah?” Rio asks. “You sure about that?”

“Higher!” Marcus repeats with a giggle. So Rio pushes him higher, keeping watch that he never slides on the swing seat or loosens his grip on the chain.

“How come you got a bird on your neck?” Marcus asks later, when he’s curled up in Rio’s bed for a bedtime story. His little hands come up to trace the feathers and contours of the bird. It’s something that he likes to do a lot, actually, whenever he’s in Rio’s arms or next to him on the couch.

Rio looks at him. “You like it?”

Marcus nods. “The lady at the park said it looked scary, but I don’t think so.”

He strokes Marcus’ hair slowly. “Sometimes people think something’s scary because they aren’t used to it. It’s new or different and they don’t know what to do.”

“Like how I’m going into first grade?” Marcus asks.

Laughing, Rio nods. “Like that. You scared?”

Marcus shakes his head. “You and Mommy wouldn’t make me go somewhere scary,” he says with absolute conviction.

“No,” Rio agrees, “we wouldn’t.”

————————————————

It’s an inconvenience when someone robs the Fine & Frugal, no more, no less. Rio is good at what he does, but he has a different set of skills too, one that makes it easy to figure out where his money went.

Fine & Frugal might not have security cameras out back, but he sure as fuck does.

He stares at the trio of women pulling masks on and chuckles.

“Well,” Mick mutters, “can’t say I was expecting that.”

Rio snorts. He wasn’t either, but it’s a nice surprise. Something to break up the monotony of the current power struggle with some people pushing up from the south of his borders.

“Get a couple of the guys,” Rio says. “We’ll pay ‘em a visit tomorrow afternoon.”

“Not today?”

He shakes his head. “Got that thing at Marcus’ school in the morning and Rhea asked me to come by for dinner ‘cause he’s stressing.”

Mick smiles. “Only you would have a kid who stresses about a first grade spelling bee.”

Rio doesn’t smile, just shrugs. It’s the kind of shit he never cared about as a kid, but that Marcus thinks is important.

“What if I lose in the first round?” Marcus asks after dinner.

“Then we go get ice cream tomorrow night,” Rio tells him.

Marcus doesn’t look convinced.

“Hey,” Rio says, aware that Rhea’s listening in from where she’s unpacking Marcus’ lunch bag, “you know that me and your mama love you, right?”

Marcus nods.

“That doesn’t change if you come in first place or last place or wherever. We love you so much,” he tells Marcus. “Nothing you can do is ever gonna stop us from loving you.”

He cheers up after that and Rio stays for his bedtime routine, promising that he’ll see him in the morning at the school.

“You’ll be there?” Rhea asks when she’s walking him out.

Rio gives her a flat look and she rolls her eyes.

“Just checking!” she says, throwing up her hands, but she’s smiling. For all that they didn’t work as a couple, they work as parents. He’s glad that it’s Rhea who tucks his boy in at night, kisses him on the forehead, patches up scrapes, and tells him to eat his veggies or no dessert.

Sometimes he can’t help but compare her to Lucia and wonder if the other woman would have done the same. For all that she had hated her family, tried to rebel against it, what other model had she had? Would she have made another Solano, even without meaning to?

Marcus places second in his class’ spelling bee and Rio gives him a big hug when he runs over with his ribbon.

“Alright, I’m gonna come by the house after you and your mom have dinner, take you out to ice cream. We gotta celebrate, yeah?”

“Yeah!”

As he drives away from the school, towards the house of a woman named Elizabeth Irene Boland, he sheds the parts of himself that he shows Marcus and Rhea, puts away his kindness and gentleness in a little box.

Cisco is a Picasso with a lock pick, but the lock at the Boland house is depressingly easy to break. Cisco almost looks disappointed as he puts his picks away.

“Don’t worry,” Rio teases him, “we’ll find you something tougher to break into.”

That makes Cisco laugh as they spread out in the kitchen. The dog, a golden retriever, comes trotting over to sniff at them.

“What the fuck is it with golden retrievers?” Mick asks, bending to scratch the dog’s head anyways. “Why do white people in the suburbs always have them?”

They snoop a little through the downstairs, letting the dog out into the backyard at one point when it goes to the door and makes a face at Dags.

The home office is in shambles. Looks like someone took a mallet to the desk and cabinets, then scattered the contents all over.

Cisco whistles. “What do you think? Domestic?”

“I don’t really give a fuck,” Rio shrugs. But domestic seems likely. A woman who’s willing to commit armed robbery must be a lot to deal with.

Finally, _finally_ , a car pulls into the driveway and they all sigh in relief. Rio had been half tempted to send out a search party for the woman.

She opens the door and he hears her baby talk the dog, “You need to go potty?”

“Nah,” he calls out, “we already let him out.”

Something in her scream wakes a part of Rio up - a part that he hadn’t really noticed falling dormant until he’s facing down with a woman who asks her dog if it needs to go potty and she’s telling him that he’s stupid for threatening her.

“You sure about that?” Mick asks quietly when they leave the house after Rio shakes his head at Mick’s questioning look.

Rio nods. “They ain’t going to the cops,” he replies. “I got some ideas about how we might use ’em.”

————————————

Rio isn’t sure what to expect when the woman leaves her pearls at the emptied out warehouse.

The likeliest scenario, he decides, is that Elizabeth Boland wants him to fuck her. Wants him to come to her house and give her what her husband clearly isn’t.

It’s the kind of thing that he normally says no to on principle. He doesn’t really want to be someone’s rebellion fuck, someone’s hot Latin lover or whatever. He’s already feeling like too much of a cliché these days.

But he’s intrigued. No one’s ever left him pearls before and fucking her wouldn’t be a hardship.

So he goes.

“So what’d you wanna talk to me about?” he asks, running his eyes over the form fitting green sweater that she’s wearing.

“I want to do more work for you.”

That’s a fucking surprise, but when he leaves her house after agreeing to send more her way, he grins to himself. Who would have thought that Elizabeth Boland had that much hidden under the surface? Maybe he’s not the only walking cliché.

————————————

“I had someone drop this off,” Gretchen says, passing Rio a big brown envelope. He takes it, but doesn’t look inside. “Said if it went through me, it fell under client-attorney privilege.”

“They give you a name?” he asks her.

She laughs. “He said that’d be the first thing you asked. Said to tell you Levi.”

Rio’s hand tightens, crumpling the envelope slightly and making Gretchen give him a disapproving glance. He loosens his grip.

“I’m charging for this,” she tells him.

“Wouldn’t expect any different, counsellor,” he calls after her as she leaves the bar that he’s doing renovations on.

So what’s Mike been up to, he wonders as he opens the envelope. There’s only a handful of pages. Asshole could have just folded them and put them in a regular envelope, he thinks as he looks through them.

One is part of a personnel file - Agent James Turner.

The next is part of a witness testimony that makes Rio grit his teeth. It’s focused on him - something old, something he’s not even involved in at the moment, but it’s enough to put him away for a while if the feds could actually prove it.

The third page is unrelated - it’s a semi-blurry picture of someone that Rio knows as a member of the cartel in Detroit.

The last page is a message, typed.

_Tell me who he is, I’ll give you your mole._

There’s a date and a time, followed by an address.

Rio laughs.

So much for Boy Scouts.

He goes to the meet.

“Still climbing the ladder, huh?” Rio says, ordering a drink.

Mike’s got a beer, a wedding ring, and an exhausted look about him. “Yeah.”

“Why should I give you shit, Mikey?”

“You don’t want to know who your mole is?” Mike asks.

Rio smiles. “You and me both know there’s ways of sniffing out moles. I don’t really give a shit if you tell me or not.”

“It’ll save you time.”

“I got time,” Rio says. “Why are you really here? There must be a dozen other people you could show that picture to and get an answer without turning over a CI. The great Mike Warren finally give up trying to act like his shit don’t stink?”

Mike looks away. “I keep in touch with Paige.”

“That’s nice.”

“She said she saw you and -“

“And what?” Rio asks. “You wanted to come get a look at me too?”

Mike’s eyes come back to him. “You know,” he says, leaning back in the booth, “I’ve spent years building a career on the bones of Graceland.” Rio has to stop himself from tensing at the name. “And I still fucking miss it.”

Rio laughs, shoulders shaking and head going back. “You miss it?” he repeats, incredulous. “Weird, man, because from what I remember, you played a pretty big fucking part of killing it. All of it.”

“That was Briggs and -“

“No,” Rio cuts him off. “You don’t get to play the blame game. Now, the way I see it, I got way less reason to trust you, so you’re gonna have to give me a name first.”

“That’s not how this -“

“Not how what works, Warren?” He nearly spits the last name. “Selling out your people?”

“Eddie,” Mike snaps. “Eddie Reyes.”

Rio settles back in his seat and looks at Mike, contemplates not telling him what he wants.

“You know,” he picks up a coaster and sets it on its side, starts to spin it, “it’s funny, the way you lose respect for people.” He gives Mike the name he’s looking for, then stands. “I’m not interested in trading information, Warren. Stay the fuck out of my life.”

He goes to a different bar, finds a pretty woman and actually takes her back to the loft. She moans like she’s being coy about her pleasure, at first, but Rio breaks her of the habit when he eats her out until she screams.

All the while, he keeps Elizabeth Boland close. There’s absolutely no reason for him to be going to her drops, it’s kid stuff. Mick could handle it in his sleep and at first, he even seems borderline offended that Rio’s going with him until one night he makes eye contact with Rio and shakes his head.

“What?” Rio asks.

“You got weird fucking tastes, man,” Mick tells him with a grin.

“So’s your mom,” Rio snaps back, making Mick laugh.

“Nah,” Dags says, “his mom’s got great taste.”

Mick elbows Dags in the side hard enough to make him grunt.

It feels good to laugh. Tomorrow he’s got to deal with Eddie and it’s not going to put him in much of a laughing mood for a few days.

As he looks at Eddie, still young enough to be convinced he’s got it all under control, Rio thinks about Johnny. Eddie has way too many harsh edges to really remind Rio of his old self, he’s too like Rio as he is now for it to be an apt comparison. But he thinks of himself in the Solano house, ingratiating himself with Carlito and Lucia’s father. Playing the family against each other.

“Turner made me,” Eddie gasps out a little while later, eyes shut against the pain. “Said he was going to make it look like I snitched even though I didn’t. I swear, man, I didn’t until -“

Turner’s a fed and Rio knows their bag of dirty tricks. Has played most of them in his time.

“Then you come to me,” Rio says, voice hard. He’s not going to forgive Eddie, even if he can sympathize with him. This part is for the people who are going to walk out of the room after this. “You think I don’t know that the feds will say fucking anything just to make you break? They will. They don’t give a shit what’s allowed and what isn’t. They’ll figure that out later.”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says.

Rio looks at him and wonders when - between Sid Markham and Eddie Reyes - that pulling the trigger at close range had become so easy. He thinks about it on the drive home. He’d had his fair share of kills when he was in the Navy, then the Bureau, but they’d always felt different. Like he was doing it for something. He’d been able to separate himself from them in a way that he can’t anymore.

He’s too pissed to go out and find someone to fuck, knows he’ll be a bad time for whoever he ends up with, so he jerks off and then goes to the gym to beat the shit out of someone who knows how to fight back.

It’s still not quite enough to take the edge off his anger and frustration, so when Elizabeth Boland throws a pair of keys in his face and yells at him, he can’t stop himself from retaliating.

“Go home, Elizabeth,” he snaps at her.

Some little voice in the back of his mind whispers that she’s not gonna go away quietly.

Not the woman that held up a grocery store with a toy gun. The woman who’d smashed up her husband’s home office. Who’d paid her debt and then asked for more, who pushed for more and more and more.

No one warned her about the undertow, Rio thinks. She’s been wading deeper and deeper, bracing against waves easy enough that she’s forgotten that the real dangers are always unseen until it’s too late and it’s dragging you out into the ocean.

He’s seen it before, has spent enough time on beaches and in the water that he knows what to look for. Even knows what to do if it grabs him. Knows what it’ll do if he fights against it. Has had enough lectures in his life - from his mom, grandparents, aunts and uncles, brothers, neighbours, the guys who taught him how to surf - that he knows that way lies death.

“Can’t fight the ocean,” an older guy had told him on the beach when he was a teenager. “All you can do is try to ride it for a while.” The man’d been high out of his fucking mind at the time, didn’t even seem too sure where he was, but Rio hadn’t ever been able to forget that.

So when the FBI shows up to arrest him a few days later, right after Fine & Frugal gets hit _again_ , he has to laugh.

“Call Gretchen,” he tells Mick when he sees the agents approaching on the security cams in the shop he’s working out of at the moment.

Mick nods, already wiping the computer of what little they’d stored on it.

When he sees that there’s news cameras there only minutes after Agent Turner takes him into custody, Rio thinks he maybe knows what kinda guy Turner is.

“You know,” Turner says as he walks around the interrogation room holding a file, “Beth Boland doesn’t seem like your type.”

He stays silent.

“She painted a pretty explicit picture of the two of you though,” Turner goes on. “Told me all about how you fucked her on her kitchen table, ‘bout how her kids had pancakes that morning.” He chuckles. “You know, the hardest part of that story for me to believe was that a woman like that leaves her kids’ breakfast dishes on the table all day.”

Rio has been subject to far more intense questioning than anything Turner’s capable of in the time between when he’s taken into custody and when Gretchen shows up.

He’s out by nightfall.

“What was that about?” Gretchen asks, then holds up her hand before he can tell her she doesn’t want to know. “Come into my office tomorrow.”

“Sure thing, counsellor,” he drawls at her.

Someone - maybe Mick - has brought his car and Gretchen gives him the keys.

Rio should go home. He knows he should go home. Thing is that he can’t. He knows who gave the feds a piece of the puzzle, big enough that they thought they could nail him for it.

He drives to her house. Van’s not there, but the husband’s car is.

He wants to hit something. Someone. He spent long enough living with Charlie and Paige to say something like he’d never hit a woman because _fuck_ , sometimes you can’t pick your opponent. But Elizabeth Boland isn’t the type to hit back. If she did, it wouldn’t be hard enough to hurt him.

Dean Boland though, seems like an acceptable outlet for his anger, even if it’s not an entirely fair fight.

Still, the guy gets a couple of half decent hits in before Rio falls into the rhythm of the fight and gets him down. He starts to stir as Rio ties his hands behind his back, starts to struggle when Rio steps away.

“You’re the bounce house guy,” the man says.

Maybe Rio hit him a little too hard in the head.

“Whatever you got my wife into, leave her alone.”

Rio laughs. “Leave _her_ alone?” He keeps laughing. “Know why that’s funny?” Rio asks Elizabeth’s husband. “Because I keep trying but your wife keeps on coming back for more. She’s the one who won’t leave me alone.”

It’s gratifying to see the expression on her face when she comes in to find him at her dining room table seated next to her bound and bloody husband. He watches her tears build and they’re the prettiest things he’s seen in a long time, wants to catch one on his thumb and taste it.

Her hand shakes when she picks up the gun. She’s not ready to pull the trigger yet. She’d do it if it was one of her babies sitting next to Rio, but her husband? Nah. Elizabeth’s all soft spots and vulnerability still.

“It’s okay,” he tells her, reaching up and touching her hair, her face, “you did your best.”

She looks almost relieved when he says it. Rio wonders when the last time someone gave her a fucking compliment was.

Rio uses Carlito’s gun to shoot the man and leaves.

He sends Mick to collect the bullet from the Boland’s wall before the police can get to it and try to run it. Just because he was being sentimental doesn’t mean he’s got to be stupid. Mick’s the one who knows the most about Rio, but even he doesn’t know what the gold gun means to him. Just knows it’s significant enough for Rio to be carrying around still.

“You ever gonna tell me where you got it?” Mick asks as he hands over the crumpled bullet.

Rio lifts an eyebrow.

Mick shrugs his big shoulders. “Never seen you use it before,” he says. “But you did tonight, for that woman. Can you blame me for being curious?”

“You ever have to read the Rime of the Ancient Mariner in school?” Rio asks. Mick nods slowly. “How that guy, he’s got to wear the albatross around his neck because he killed it even though he shouldn’t have and it got everyone cursed?”

“You saying your gun is an albatross?” Mick is looking at him like he thinks Rio might be losing it.

Rio shakes his head. “Nah. I’m saying this is what I used to kill my albatross.”

He didn’t really kill it though, he thinks. Carlos Solano Junior’s dead, hadn’t even survived long enough to go on trial, and while he’d been the one to put Carlito in prison, he didn’t kill him. The Solano name did in the end. 

But Johnny had certainly helped.

——————————————

Rio isn’t entirely sure what to call his drive to toy with Elizabeth. He’s attracted to her, he’ll admit that easily enough even if he doesn’t think there’s a chance she’ll let him fuck her. But that doesn’t explain why he takes Marcus to the park he knows she goes to with her lady friends. Why he sends that storage locker key.

When she asks him the same question, he just smiles. “Because I think you can be somebody,” he tells her truthfully. Could be like me, he doesn’t add.

So when he’s at the bar, having a drink before heading home to get as much sleep as he can, and sees her come in, he thinks she’s just doing the same. Needling him with what she has.

Then she makes eye contact with him and stands, turns and walks away to the hall leading to the washrooms. Rio follows without hesitating.

When he sinks into her, pinned against the wall, it feels better than anything has in a long time. Her cries are loud enough that people in the hall can probably hear her, but Rio doesn’t care, smiling into her neck when her hand flails out, activating the paper towel dispenser as she comes.

She leaves first and Rio cleans himself up before he follows, grinning at the guy who glares at him.

He thinks, briefly, about following their car home. He doesn’t know why. It’s not like it would achieve anything.

Sitting in the fuck ugly Corvette a bit later, just waiting to honk the horn and alert the Bolands to his presence, Rio thinks about what the fuck he’s doing. He’s not sure anymore if he’s playing her or if she’s playing him. He needs to do something to rebalance the scales, remind her that the only power she has is what he allows her to have.

“You can have whatever you want!” she yells, desperate for him to stop hitting the car. 

She’s lying though. He _can’t_ have whatever he wants, not even just whatever he wants from her. He can’t explain that to her though. How do you tell someone else that you want to bury yourself under their skin like a stubborn splinter that you just can’t get out?

Was that how Carlito had felt?

The thought turns him cold and when he goes home afterwards, he has trouble falling asleep. And who knew that this, of all things, would be what made him lose sleep. He’s never wanted to express affection through violence and destruction before. Had hated the thought of those things becoming tangled up until you couldn’t tell which was which anymore.

—————————————

Elizabeth tests Rio’s patience. Every interaction with her pushes him to the edge faster than anything else and he just doesn’t understand why.

What is it about her that’s gotten under his skin? She’s pretty, but Rio’s fucked prettier. Smarter. Funnier. But it didn’t matter what angle he thought about it from, he still couldn’t figure it out.

Maybe it was her sheer fucking audacity, he thinks upon discovering that his cars are empty. Her unwillingness to just leave shit alone.

She sits at her desk and tells him that they’re going 50/50 now.

“You look good behind that desk,” he rasps. “Hell, you’d look so much better on top of it.”

He expects her to turn him down, she’s beginning to learn about when to give and take power. No matter how good her position is now, if she lets him fuck her against the desk, she can never fully divorce business from pleasure. Neither of them would be able to. And it doesn’t matter how clever she’s proven herself to be, she’s still gonna be the one getting fucked, Rio’d see to that.

It doesn’t mean that he’s not disappointed by it.

They’ve fallen into a rhythm, albeit an erratic one, when she tells him that her husband took the kids.

Rhea’s never done that to him, but he can empathize. “It’s lonely,” he tells Beth, “at the top.”

It’s a lesson he’s been taught again and again. He gets the feeling she won’t really listen to him, just the way that he hadn’t listened to all the well meaning pieces of advice that he’s been given in his life. You have to learn your lessons.

But they don’t always stick.

“What am I doing here, Elizabeth?” he asks her when she takes him to her house. He’s been inside of it before, has even been invited there by her pearls once, but he’s never done this - getting out of his car and following her in. She seems just as flustered as him, even though it’s her space.

He follows her to her bedroom. She doesn’t say anything as she starts to take off her layers. She must really be a mess, because her socks don’t match. It makes him grin because it suits her, being a little off kilter, out of step.

He lets her take the lead, lets her kiss him for the first time because the idea that despite the intimacy of standing quietly together in her bedroom at midday she might say no doesn’t sit well with him. There’s only so much he’s willing to risk.

But she does kiss him. She starts to unbutton his shirt, so he goes for hers. They didn’t get naked in the bathroom. Even if the setting had allowed for it, he doesn’t think that they would have. That was needy, desperate.

This is too, but in a different way. Like an ache deep in his bones when he misses something that he used to be. It doesn’t make sense - she isn’t anything like surfing at dawn, just floating in the ocean as he gets ready to ride a wave. There’s nothing for him _to_ miss.

Rio doesn’t take over until he has her topless. He grabs her by the hips and practically topples her down onto her bed, laughing at her indignant squeak even as he watches her breasts bounce and shift. He shrugs off his shirt.

“Pants,” he says, starting to undo his own.

She does the same, kicking them off and pulling her feet in so that she can take off her socks too.

Her cotton panties make him think that she might not have planned this, might not have intended it to happen this way, but Rio doesn’t care, just yanks them off and puts his head between her legs.

It’s been a while for her, he thinks to himself, since someone did this. Which is a shame because her thighs shake and her moans quickly turn desperate. When he pulls away before he finishes, she protests.

“No, keep going,” she pants.

Rio chuckles. “No.”

She looks like she’s going to argue and he has to admit, he’s curious about what reasoning she’ll give, but he shoves down his underwear as he moves up her body.

“Oh,” she says.

“Oh,” Rio repeats back as he takes his cock and starts to rub it up and down the seam of her cunt, taking extra care at the top. Her legs tremble slightly and her hips tilt up. He’s tempted to make her beg for it, but he’s pretty sure that it’ll take ages to make her break like that. 

As much as he wants to see it, hear it, he doesn’t want to wait either, so he just adjusts his grip and pushes his cock into her.

His hands sink into the mattress on either side of her head as he watches her face. There’s a slight discomfort for her at first, but it melts away before he can even do anything.

Without his shirt to hold it in place, Rio’s necklace brushes over Beth’s chest as he fucks her, bent down close because he wants to see everything up close. He could straighten up, watch himself split her open, her little hands curling in the pillows in an attempt to anchor herself. But he wants to watch the flutter of her eyelashes, wants to taste her moans, so he stays where he is.

In all likelihood, it doesn’t take long for them both to get off. If he looked at the clock again, there probably wouldn’t be a big difference from when he’d glanced at it when he first came into the bedroom. But it _feels_ like it does. Feels like it’s been hours or days, just the two of them fucking. Other words and phrases pop up in his head, but he hates them all. None of them are right.

Maybe he already knows what’s coming, some part of his head registering the little oddities of her behaviour, just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“I’m done,” she says, dropping that other shoe along with a stack of cash. “I’m out.”

No, Rio thinks, you aren’t.

—————————————

Rio can admit that sending body parts to her by mail is not his best moment.

“You’re like a fucking cat,” Mick tells him after handing him a finger, “leaving dead birds on her lawn.”

Mick leaves before Rio can say anything in response to that. If it was anyone else, Rio’d tear him a new one, but it’s Mick, the closest thing that he has to a brother these days and he isn’t wrong.

The only reason that Rio lets her follow him around, all the way back to the loft, is because he’s already planning a transition to a new spot. All of Marcus’ really important stuff has been moved to his bedroom at Rhea’s so it won’t get lost in the move. He’s tempted to walk over to her van and tell her that she’s terrible at this, but it’s too amusing. Besides, he wants to see what she’ll do.

She’s fumbling in his bedside stand when he slips into the loft. If he had to guess, she’s already checked the closet, maybe the kitchen. There’s nothing for her to find. Does she think he just leaves around pieces of rotting bodies in his home where his son could find them?

“It’ll take a lifetime to wash all that money,” she says.

“Yeah,” Rio agrees, “that’s kinda the point.”

You don’t get to walk in and out of this life at will, staying clean. It doesn’t work, no matter how hard you try. You might get away with it for a while, but there’s always going to come a day when you can’t scrub away the dirt without taking the last layer of skin without it, when you realize that the filth and anger are the only things still holding you together, still protecting what’s left of you.

Rio has always assumed, ever since he took his position, that it would end with a gun. The fact that it’s Carlito’s lends a certain dramatic element to it that Rio thinks the bastard would appreciate if he were here to see it. He laughs at the thought, blood spilling out of his mouth even as it clogs his throat.

People always say that blood tastes like copper, like old pennies, but Rio’s had enough of it in his mouth in his life to know that it tastes like blood. That’s it. There isn’t poetry to it.

There’s rarely poetry in death and it’s fitting that there should be none in his. He’s always expected that.

He just wasn’t expecting it to be Elizabeth Boland that pulled the trigger.

—————————————

When Rio blinks awake, he knows he’s in the hospital.

So Turner got him in on time.

He moves his hand to put it over the wounds, but someone grabs his hand to stop him.

“Don’t do that, Johnny.”

He shuts his eyes at the sound of Chuck’s voice. “The fuck you doing here?” he rasps out.

She doesn’t reply, but after a moment there’s something poking at his lips.

“Drink the fucking water, Johnny,” she snaps at him.

Rio drains the cup and looks at her.

She’s cut her hair, it doesn’t fall around her shoulders like it used to. They used to sit on her bed watching shitty reality TV, yelling at the screen, and she’d make him brush her hair sometimes. It had been relaxing. His fingers had been awkward when he tried to braid it, but he hadn’t been awful.

“Happened to your hair?” he asks.

Charlie smiles and reaches up to run her fingers through it. “Like it?”

“Looks nice,” he says.

“My six year old put gum in it two months ago,” she tells him. “I cried when they cut it, but I’m thinking I kinda like it. Go through way less hair products.”

“You got kids?” Good, she should. She’d wanted them. He can remember when she lost the baby in that Florida swamp and didn’t tell anyone at first.

“I,” she says proudly, “am a foster parent.”

She’s settled down in LA, mostly works a desk.

“Really?” Rio asks in disbelief.

Charlie nods. “Got tired of chasing bad guys,” she says with a shrug, but he’s pretty sure there’s more to it than that. “And no fucking way would they have let me be a single foster parent if I was still doing that.”

She has two kids right now. The aforementioned six year old - Amma, who’s been living with her for eight months - and a sixteen year old she’s in the midst of adopting - Brendan.

“What are you doing here, Chuck?” he says after a while.

“I missed you.”

Rio looks up at the ceiling. “Don’t want you here,” he says.

“Don’t give a shit.”

Neither of them says anything for a long minute.

“Guess you got tired of chasing bad guys too.”

Rio snorts. “Not the only thing I got tired of.”

“Yeah,” Charlie agrees, “got tired of the law from what I heard.”

“You hear that from Briggs?” Rio asks. “He tell you how he knows that?”

“Briggs is gone.”

Rio looks at her.

“Not dead,” Charlie clarifies, “but gone. No one’s seen him in over a year. Haven’t heard from him either. Not even me.” The twitch in her fingers gives her away. It upsets her that Briggs dropped off the face off the earth and hasn’t even contacted her.

“Finally did something right then,” Rio says. “Should have cut you loose years ago, ‘stead of dragging you into his shit.”

“Don’t say that,” Charlie scowls. “You don’t get to say that, Johnny -“

“Get out.”

She looks at him. “No.”

“Chuck,” he says, “I don’t want to see you. Don’t want to see Mike or Paige or any of you. I don’t want to remember. Don’t want to think about Briggs, the Solanos, Sid. And you? That’s what you remind me of. I’m not Johnny.”

“José,” Charlie suggests.

“No. Rio.”

She bites her lip. “Where’d that name come from?”

“What’s it fucking matter?” Rio asks. “Go back to LA, be with your kids. Take a page out of everyone else’s book and don’t give a shit for anyone but yourself. Surely you learned that at Graceland.”

Charlie shakes her head.

“Maybe you should have,” he snaps, wanting her gone. “How old would he have been now? Eight? Nine?”

Her head jerks back.

“But no, Charlie DeMarco looks after everybody else because she’s such a fucking martyr,” he keeps going. “And what’s that gotten you other than a dead son?”

She stands up. “Don’t you dare.”

“You didn’t save anyone, Charlie,” he tells her. “Not Briggs, not Amber, Jakes, Mike, Paige, me. Just let us fucking go instead of acting like you’re some kind of saint. No one gives a shit.”

“Fuck you, Johnny,” Charlie says, tears building up in her eyes. She leaves, grabbing her jacket and phone.

He falls back asleep.

She doesn’t come back.

—————————————————

Setting up Turner is child’s play. As he checks out of the hotel, he knows that somewhere across the city, Agent James Turner is bursting into an empty warehouse. He’ll probably be furious, yelling at his team and trying to figure out what happened. He won’t have a chance to ask Rio, because around the corner there’s a van with three guys in the back. They’ll all have guns.

It might have bothered him once, ordering a killing like this. He doesn’t even know the names of everybody that’s gonna die. Doesn’t particularly give a shit. The part of him that would have balked at this has been burnt away slowly, like a soft outer skin. He could make the comparison to a phoenix, but phoenixes didn’t tend to dive into the ashes.

He takes a day before going to see Marcus. He suddenly feels unsure about the airplane that he’d decided to give his son. He’s been gone for months - did Marcus even still like planes? Or is Rio a beat too late, bringing him something he doesn’t even care about.

To his relief, Rhea’s fridge is still covered with drawings of planes, a sure sign that Marcus is still interested in them.

“Can Dad stay for dinner?” Marcus asks Rhea, holding onto Rio’s arm.

Rhea looks at them. “Can he?” Rio nods. “Then I guess we’d better show him what we’ve been making lately.”

Rio is shocked by how excited he is for a home cooked meal. He lets himself get pulled into it along with them, helping Marcus measure out herbs and spices for the sauce.

“How much oregano?” Marcus asks, a bunch of measuring spoons in one hand and the packet of oregano in the other. “I can see the one,” he tells Rio, “but I get mixed up with teaspoons and tablespoons.”

Rio smiles. “Which one is bigger? A tea cup or a table?”

“Table!” Marcus laughs.

“Tablespoon is bigger,” Rio explains. “And see how it gets shortened?” He points to the measurements in the recipe book. “We got t-s-p, which is teaspoon and t-b-s-p, which is tablespoon. So teaspoon has three letters, tablespoon has four. Which one’s longer?”

“Tablespoon! So the longer one is the bigger measurement,” Marcus concludes.

“Yup.”

Rhea laughs quietly from where she’s opening cans of crushed tomatoes.

“What?” Rio demands with mock offence.

“That has got to be the most roundabout way of learning that,” she says.

Rio just grins. “But it works.”

“Yeah,” Marcus agrees.

Rhea’s pasta sauce doesn’t take three days and there’s no story to go with it. But it’s made with just as much love as Charlie’s ever was and he gets to share it with his son, so if push came to shove, it’s the one he’d pick every time.

He’s tired when he returns to his safe house, burdened with the knowledge that Elizabeth’s been interfering with Marcus and Rhea. She just couldn’t leave things alone.

He naps before getting ready to take Rhea’s place at her appointment with Beth. He does the exercises that the physio gave him, showers, gets dressed, then opens up his jewellery box. It’s overflowing with rings and bracelets and necklaces - some that he’s bought, some he’s been given, a couple that Marcus has made for him.

What he’s looking for is underneath the top compartment, so he lifts that out carefully in order to grab the small little bag.

Rio pulls at the top of it, shifting the strings until the opening is big enough that he can tip the contents into his open palm.

They’re little, for having caused so much damage, but when it comes to the human body, the tiniest invaders are often the most painful, the deadliest.

He rolls his thumb over the three bullets, feeling the now familiar grooves and scratches. The one that they pulled from his lung is the most intact. If it hadn’t been, he probably wouldn’t have survived. The one she put in his shoulder hit bone, breaking with the impact. The third was in his spleen, a part of his body that he’d never given much thought to before the doctor had told him that it had been damaged.

One of the guys had found Carlito’s gun amongst Turner’s things, part of a case he was no doubt building against Rio. Mick had been the one to bring it to him, hold it out.

“What do you want to do with it?” Mick had asked him, watching him carefully. Still want to be reminded of your albatross, he was asking.

“Get rid of it,” Rio had said.

He curls his fingers around the handful of metal, already warming to his body. It’s only right, they were part of it once, even if it was only for a while.

Rio has spent years thinking of Graceland as the place that made him how he is. Why else would he have killed Sid for Carlito, even if it was to protect Lucia? 

But in the time since, he’s begun to think differently.

He understands that Graceland had taken what he was and melted him down, hammered him and folded him again and again until he was sharp, had hardened him until he was unbreakable.

If Graceland was his crucible as much as it was his cradle, he thinks as he slides into the space at the bar next to Elizabeth, perhaps he is hers.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to neveroffanon and medievalraven for beta-ing this! If there's content that should be warned for or if you think that the warnings need to be more clear, please let me know. Title is from FKA twigs' "home with you".


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